JFrog Now Supports RubyGems

JFrog recently announced new support for RubyGems in its cloud-based Artifactory binary repository manager. Why? Because, the company says, Rubyists shouldn't have to depend solely on RubyGems.org to store, manage, and share gems.

"This support was something that was requested by the community," JFrog chief architect Fred Simon told ADTmag. "A lot of Ruby guys opened an issue on our issue tracker and we basically followed up. But also, it came from scratching an itch of our own. We are using the Chef [configuration management tool] and Ruby for all of the automated deployment of our cloud platform, and we saw that there was no easy way to manage your own RubyGems repository, where you could add your own gems and aggregate whatever gems you are using from the outside."

RubyGems, the open source package management framework, is used to distribute and share reusable functionality (gems) with other Rubyists. RubyGems.org, which became part of the standard library in in 2007 with the release of Ruby 1.9, is the community's primary gem-hosting service.

Because gems are technically binaries (packaged code), Artifactory serves as the perfect resource for hosting and management, Simon argues. Rubyists can use the JFrog repository to store, manage, and share gems using source control systems. They can also host gems that are not available in RubyGems, and, because it's a local repository, they have a place to host gems they might not want to put on RubyGems.org.

The company is also reaching out to niche Ruby devs in this release by providing them with a repository "more suited to their programming needs," said JFrog senior developer Ron Mamo in a statement. "There's something the Ruby community can borrow from the 'dark Java Enterprise' side: the proper binary repository. And we have one that fits that need perfectly."

"This gives all the Ruby developers in the organization the same view of the same list of gems in a centralized place," Simon said, "which makes it much easier to develop an environment where they can play around and develop their ideas."

Artifactory, which is also open source, was one of the first binary repository management solutions. It integrates with the open-source Jenkins continuous integration (CI) server, Atlassian's Bamboo CI, JetBrains' TeamCity build and CI server, the Gradle and Apache Maven project automation tools, and the NuGet package manager for .NET, among others.